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Rita and Runt - Play Dead
I was very young when this event happened to me, young enough to be scarred for life by what I witnessed many years ago. I was probably around ten or twelve years old I think, old enough to speak and walk to my knowledge, everything is fuzzy from that time, and for good reasons too. Back then, we didn't really live in a home of our own, we would spend our days staying with a friend. This kind of made this event more unique for that time, I actually did make a friend who actually helped me deal with what happened. His name was Scotty, he was a little boy who was about my age. He was a very kind kid, you could probably say that he was my first official friend. This event that I keep mentioning is the reason why I'm terrified of the dark. To tell the truth, it really screwed me up since, even though I am aware that there is nothing in the dark, there is a subconscious fear I feel every time the lights go off. Another weird anomaly of this event is how well I can remember it, my memory isn't really that good. It was a dark and empty night in the small town my mom's friends lived in. Outside, you couldn't see anything except for what the street lamps were illuminating. My mom's friends lived in a small house in the middle of what I would call nowhere. My mom, her friends, Scotty, and I were all hanging out in the living room. I was in the corner playing one of those educational computer games on the small computer that my mom's friend owned. Next to me was this big wooden TV cabinet that held a pretty big TV for the 1990's. In the middle of the cabinet, there was the TV, and on both sides of the TV, there was the biggest collection of VHS movies that I have ever laid my eyes on at the time, but not being interested in films at the time, I didn't really care for it. In front of the TV on an old, blue rug was Scotty. He was laying on his stomach watching TV while my mom and her friends were laughing drunkenly on the old brown sofa behind him. They continued their merry little party for a couple of hours until my mom eventually became exhausted and decided to go to bed. Before she left though, I remember seeing her turn around in the hallway to her friends and telling them to put me to bed in 30 minutes, then she went off to bed. That is when I got bored and decided to flip through channels for some of the cartoons I used to watch, like Scooby-Doo, Batman: The Animated Series, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, and, of course, The Animaniacs. Oh boy, where do I even begin with this one? Scotty and I watched Animaniacs till another episode came on. That episode terrified the ever-loving crap out of me and Scotty. We remember constantly covering our eyes and praying it would be over soon, but we couldn't stop watching it anyway. We felt drawn to it, like moths to a flame, despite me and Scotty feeling increasingly frightened more and more as the episode continued. The episode was about Rita and Runt on a farm somewhere in the northern United States, like Montana. They were told by their owners not to visit the well on the far side of the yard. The two disobeyed their owners and visited it anyway. A bunch of demons came up out of the well, stole Runt's head, and now Rita had to go down and find it. The first few minutes of the episode was animated in the typical Animaniacs style. But after Rita went down to Hell (and yes, they did refer to it as just that), it suddenly switched to a more twisted and surreal appearance, similar to that of one of those stop-motion animations Tim Burton would make. I still remember how Hell was depicted in the episode perfectly. It was mostly red with a few grotesque images here and there. The walls looked like flesh, and the gates looked like rows and rows of human teeth, constantly moving like wheels. There were hands coming out of the walls and the ceiling, the latter constantly reached over and tried to grab Rita as she ran through all of this with a terrified expression. But throughout the episode, Rita constantly encountered various obstacles. Some of the demons she met ended up helping her, while others were less helpful. There was no possible way of knowing who was friend or foe. The first creature she met was some sort of tall spider/rat/bat thing that made a growling/laughing sound like a demonic Gargamel as it tried to grab Rita and bite off her head. I don't remember most of the other obstacles she encountered, save for the Butcher. The Butcher was an enormous, terrifying, bloodthirsty, muscular being wearing a white bloodstained apron and carrying two meat cleavers. He reminded me of the final boss (of the same name) from the game Psychonauts. Except with pale skin and wore nothing but the bloody apron, with horns on his head, and his fleshy spinal column sticking out of his back. True to his name, he had a cage full of damned souls all drawn in the traditional Animaniacs style sitting on his shelf. The men and women were all screaming, crying, and begging for release in a heart-wrenchingly realistic manner as the Butcher would reach into the cage, pull out a frightened person, lay him or her down on the bench, and chop them up with the sound of crunching bones. I even remember him licking the blood off his cleaver in one shot! I remember when Rita saw the Butcher, he spoke to her in this horrible deep distorted-sounding voice, lower than any human voice I'd ever heard, before grabbing her by her back and trying to chop her to bits. There was also the Devil itself. I use “it” because I couldn't tell if it was a male or female. I remember it having multiple faces, large bat wings, multiple horns, and two, large, almond-shaped eyes where a man's nipples would've been. It was also large enough to be a giant. I remember there being a strange song that played as the Devil and its minions tossed Runt's severed head around in one scene, which I thought was a parody of my favorite Disney song, the reprised version of "Friends On The Other Side" from The Princess and The Frog. Speaking of Runt's severed head, that's another thing I remember quite vividly. See, Runt's head was alive while it was separated from his body. As the Devil held the head, it cried and begged the Devil to return it to its body. I also remember the episode constantly cutting back to the farm where Runt's headless body continued to walk around, picking up random stuff like rocks and placing them on its neck stump trying comedically to replace its old head. I laughed a bit, seeing that it reminded me of that moment from a Halloween special of Popeye The Sailor; where Olive Oil thought Popeye (after being blown up by a stick of dynamite) was a "Headless Man". After it got to the scene where Rita finally makes it to where the Devil is keeping Runt's head, Scotty's dad came in and saw what was going on in the episode. Then he noticed me and Scotty looking petrified as we continued to stare at the screen. I think he then realized this film was too much for us, as he turned the TV off, and sent us to bed, so we didn't get to see how the episode ended. I never saw or heard anything about that episode ever again. I never found it on VHS or DVD covers, neither can I find any info about it on the internet. It seems to have just vanished from existence, despite being from Warner Bros. But I still remember that episode explicitly well, even twenty years later. It's been haunting me for years. Right before I wrote this, I asked Scotty about the episode, and he said he remembered it too, but didn't know anything about it now and days, which proves I didn't imagine or dream it. I have no idea where that episode is now, or even if there's more than meets the eye. If you have footage of the lost episode, please provide proof of some kind. Like a screencap or a picture of the episode. Just so that I can show the world that I'm not crazy, and that Animaniacs' most nightmarish episode ever, really did exist. Category:Lost Episodes Category:Animaniacs Category:Warner Bros Category:Blood and Gore Category:Suggested Reading Category:Hell Category:Demon/Devil